While cineastes are spoilt for choices at the 13th edition of the Pune International Film Festival (PIFF), three unheralded, powerful films dealing with the complexities of motherhood and childhood, break the cinematic straitjacket in a unique fashion.
Bad Hair , from Venezuelan writer-director Mariana Rondon, brilliantly manages to meld variegated and important issues such as gender trouble, class turmoil and race in present-day Latin America, and makes them hinge on an astonishingly simple plot device. Junior (stunningly played by Samuel Lange Zambrano) is a nine-year-old boy living in a housing project in Caracas and wishes to straighten his curls — a genetic legacy of his black, deceased father (presumably in a violent gunfight). His mother, Marta, a lower-middle class woman working as a security guard frets over Junior’s wish, while showering love on another baby (Junior’s half-brother) — born with straight hair and of a different father.
“It naturally was a fascinating experience gelling and duelling with Zambrano,” remarks Ms. Castillo, at a press conference here on Saturday. “There is a lot of implied violence and tension bubbling about the surface of the film, but none of it is telegraphed. The audience has to decode it for themselves,” she says .
Black Hair has been creating little ripples at film festivals over the world, as has Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid’s The Kindergarten Teacher about Nira (of the titular profession) and her obsession with a five-year-old, poetry reciting prodigy. Her husband is a “nice man” — addicted to lowbrow television fare and utterly lacking in finer sensitivities. Bearing the cross of her husband’s mediocrity in silence, Nira’s joy knows no bounds when she discovers her little prodigy. But then she must face reality and battle to shield the child from crassness and pretentiousness permeating modern society. Despite divided opinions among bewildered critics, the film has been hailed as a masterly denunciation of the material life. “I had to match Lapid’s vision. He is a most demanding, amazingly creative filmmaker. The film is a tightrope between reality and otherworldliness and I had to bring that out,” says cinematographer Shai Goldman , speaking to reporters here. Goldman’s gorgeous, careful lensing to match Lapid’s bleak outlook towards a vulgar, modern society and its dreamy, unrealistic protagonist, has garnered especial plaudits from critics.The third film, Russian filmmaker Galina Krasnoborova’s Between the Black and the Red Land , recalls the unforgiving mise en scene of Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterworks such as The Mirror , Stalker and The Sacrifice in its spare setting of a nation inhabited only by a young woman and two old women. “The old women are pining for motherhood while the younger one has an abortion carried out by a ritualistic suicide. I wanted to carry out a unique experiment with the theme of motherhood,” explains Krasnoborova, in broken English. She remarks that it is a film Indians will connect with and understand.
